Climate Change

[GreenDragon]

I think this promotes a bigger discussion though, regarding green energy. I'm all for that, but I think a lot of those plans are also kind of shortsighted. Or, rather, they are looking at the end result of green energy without looking at the path.

Yes. You rarely hear anyone discuss this aspect of green energy.
Clean energy and green lifestyles have a dirty little secret.

Prius drivers might feel less green if someone explained where electricity comes from and how "things" get made.

 

[Tranquility]

Did you read the entire Snopes report that you linked?
They rated the article they used a "Mixture". Some was true and some was not.
Every word I quoted was true.
Some publishers/websites articles showed more or less of the story, some true, some false.
You are correct if you mean that there was more to the story.
The article I quoted from did lack some content and details from the original story, but was all true.

Just saying, climate issues should not be decided by science deniers.

The main thing that was considered false:

WHAT'S FALSE: Concerns hinged solely or mostly on the dangers of solar panels "sucking up all the energy from the sun."​

The headline to the post I replied with the Snopes link to:

Town Rejects Solar Panels That Would ‘Suck up All the Energy From the Sun’

​

 

[herbivore21]

You probably are not a scientist, and that means you can’t independently evaluate any of the climate science claims.

Actually, I am a paid independent research scientist. All of the cannabis knowledge that I have shared here and that you have liked many times comes as the benefit of a formal college scientific education including postgrad, as well as an academic career in research!

You could try to assess the credibility of the scientists using your common sense and experience, but let’s face it – you aren’t good at that.

Actually, I am literally paid to do this.

Ask the majority of polling experts who said Trump had only a 2% chance of becoming president. Ask the experts who said the government’s historical “food pyramid” was good science. Ask the experts who used to say marijuana was a gateway drug. Ask the experts who used to say sexual orientation is just a choice. Ask the experts who said alcoholism is a moral failure and not a matter of genetics.

Most polls are not scientific, and do not draw from robust, representative samples - including almost all election polling!!! Many polls are carried out using skewed samples of the population due to the data collection methodology (one old chestnut is surveying people over landline phones - who the fuck has one of those anymore? - or using home-owners databases, this obviously only captures certain parts of the population by demographic and should be expected not to represent the population broadly).

Anyone who trusted the majority of unscientific election polls and the scientifically/statistically illiterate mainstream media who broadly publicised them didn't have a problem because they listened to the science bro. Which leads to my next point:

The USDA, who put into place the food pyramid, are a government agency. Not an independent scientific organization. Again we hit the problem of lay interpretation of scientific information. Let's also remember that the food pyramid first appeared in 1992 and even then, was criticized by scientists for not representing the most recent discoveries in dietetics, nutrition and other health-related research. Scientists are in-fact the ones who have laid down the most stinging and cogent criticisms of the food pyramid consistently over the years! Jump on www.scholar.google.com and search 'history of food pyramid' and you should be able to piece together enough information to see what I'm saying from abstracts (summaries of studies freely available for all paywalled articles) alone that scientists have long criticized the food pyramid before the mainstream caught onto these problems.

Commenting on alcoholism as a moral failure is a fundamentally unscientific comment, and this view cannot be formed scientifically. Science is about methodological observation and description of phenomena, science is useful for description, understanding and manipulating the functions of natural and man-made phenomena, but cannot be used to derive prescriptions or proscriptions - ie: what we do with scientific knowledge - that is a question of morality/philosophy.

Morality is a philosophical question (within ethics, a sub-discipline of philosophy) which is ultimately subjective, relying on the varying values and goals/interests of the individual in question (which are necessarily wildly varied). In other words, any experts, even if they were scientists (most were not) who commented on alcoholism as a moral failure were not guided by science, and your criticism is not of science there. I will highlight that alcoholism has genetic components, but it is NOT entirely determined by genetics (very few things are solely genetic, environmental factors also influence the outcomes re: alcoholism at a non-genetic level - importantly, we also need to consider epigenetics - where the very genetic makeup of an organism can mutate and change as a result of environmental influences!).

One major reason that the author of the blog post you cited would not have understood that the morality/alcoholism argument is not a scientific one is because he appears to have qualifications in business and economics, where he would not have been taught about the history, philosophy and nature of scientific methods and the scientific epistemology - and so cannot be expected to understand that his critique there was not of a scientific claim and hence irrelevant to the broader discussion of how to test the claims of climate science.

The predominately government, DEA and other regulatory/enforcement 'experts' that said that cannabis was a gateway drug actually cherry-picked from research data. For example, in the 70's, much of the same body of literature that identified correlations (remember this golden rule of scientific method - correlation does not necessarily equal causation!!! Anyone using correlational studies alone to argue a causal relationship doesn't understand how to use science) between cannabis use and later use of 'hard drugs' also identified the same 'gateway effect' from alcohol! Here are a few examples:

http://alcalc.oxfordjournals.org/content/9/3/94.short

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/190/4217/912

Additionally, scientists were criticising the shortcomings and highlighting the controversy of the 'gateway drug' hypothesis for cannabis as far back as the 70's (possibly earlier too, most academic journal databases do not necessarily preserve articles that are older, which typically are in archives and may or may not have ever been digitized, and hard copies of very old research on a debunked topic can be hard to find). Remember, if something is controversial, a scientist has a career/financial interest in DEBUNKING IT! Controversial and contradictory findings are the bread and butter of the research scientist. This is the shit that gets published and makes a name for a researcher. I want to contradict my peers as much as possible if I can at all back it up with evidence, that's more $$$ in the bank/more hash on my nail

http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/491393

^^ This article is an example of such discussion, unfortunately you are not going to be able to read the research unless you have scholarly journal subscriptions. I hate that this is how scholarly research is communicated btw - but this is a problem with publishers, not scientists. I wish that research was more publicly available so that folks like yourself could check out the data rather than feeling like you're left to take somebody else's word for things.

As you can see, I've shown each of the critiques you cited of 'experts' are not a reflection of scientists/scientific thought, but other 'experts', government organizations etc (of whom I'm as generally skeptical of as you are) as well as being based on moral judgements that are fundamentally not able to be held to be a product of scientific methods.

Some of these cases are actually examples of the same political/media/lay misunderstanding of the nature, findings and other finer points of the application of science that I describe above. These of course, entail an inability to communicate scientific matters clearly and relevantly to the public for the purpose of making decisions on questions of science.

This leads to mistrust in 'experts' which can be conflated and cause mistrust of scientists, who unlike many other kinds of 'experts', must show their working, their data, EVERY TIME for their work to be taken seriously by their peers and even ever get published, let alone be able to be scrutinized by the public!

Very few people have ever had to painstakingly account for every single action and step they have taken over a very long period (most of our research projects go on for years!) like we scientists have to EVERY FUCKING DAY!

It is exhausting, but it is the nature of science. We have to be open and explicit with our data, methods and findings and accountable to scrutiny from our peers, before we even consider the scrutiny we might get from others! There are flaws in some areas of scientific practice, but we independent academic scientists are scrutinized so much more than just about any other kind of expert and our findings can be fully audited and dissected more readily than those in any other profession because we are required to exhaustively document and expected (being required contractually, by law, or by both to do so) to retain any raw data that informed our findings and provide them to any interested party in order to get published and not be readily debunked and fade into obscurity.

CONTINUED... (too many words)

*N.B. I know I have really spent a lot of time in these posts laboring the point that scientists have to be far more accountable than others, but honestly, if I had any one of you guys accompany me just getting approval from a research ethics committee, most of you would go home in frustration before we'd even finished applying to start a project. The requirements for us to even be approved to conduct an independent scientific study (especially with human subjects) are so painstaking to satisfy that you'll end up preferring 1000 visits to your local DMV over a single application to your research ethics committee

 

[herbivore21]

Continued...

Also remember that the bulk of internet debate surrounding climate science is not dealing with actual research output at all.

The dilbert blog article you cited is an example of such debate. Not a single reference to a single piece of scholarly research output, rather referring to lay political/media/public discourse (conspicuously ignoring scientific discourses!), several unrelated broad historic phenomena which I've shown above to actually be criticisms of non-scientific experts, while scientists were vigorously presenting opposing views to those discredited ideas - gateway drug theory, food pyramid, alcoholism as a moral failing - long before the mainstream openly prosecuted these arguments.

This is a central problem to climate change discourse - everybody except for the people actually doing the research seems to be screaming at each other about one point of view or another, getting more and more nasty as public discourse around the world has itself become (this makes the often mild-mannered scientist want to stay right away from public discourse on their fields of expertise and compounds the problem more). In the meantime, the people who actually have to discover and document the knowledge are drowned out by the various hollering partisans who aren't interested in anything but fighting with the other side

I am not accusing you of being one of these hollering partisans, my friend - I don't know nor care about your personal politics - I'm here to discuss cannabis and science as it relates to cannabis and to enjoy my time with folks like you in mutual appreciation .

You and many others have indicated that you appreciate and respect my contributions/knowledge of cannabis. You have liked so many of my posts and I appreciate that man But I have to say, all of this knowledge owes to my formal training as a scientist, my own lab-work and just as significantly (actually moreso!), the formal research output of scientists other than myself. When you share information that implies that scientists require us to trust them on faith alone, that we don't do every single thing that we can to be accountable and to have our work verified, I have to take issue with it because it is just not true and negates a lifetime of my own hard work dedicated to understanding and doing science and to ensure that I am open to scrutiny. Scientists are the only folks to have put up their data for all to see, while meeting the strictest standards on earth relating to substantiating evidence! They have had to be able to show that is is replicable and describes what they purport it to. As a matter of mandatory practice, scientists have to be as accountable as any human being is ever expected to be.

Your problem is with the people that are tasked with deciding what to do with scientific information at a societal level (this again is a moral/ethical judgement, a philosophical decision for which science necessarily has no answers) - and I'm telling you bro, those people are not scientists and we don't have control over what they do!

The source that you have quoted is neither from a scientist, nor does it engage with any specific scientific sources at all. It does not cite claims, which is a minimum requirement for testing all written claims and discussion of scientific questions, instead paraphrasing lay/media/political discourses (also generally without references) and referring to zero research output.

I think I've said my piece as much as necessary. I won't continue posting in here because all I wanted to do is highlight that we all benefit from science (especially where medical cannabis is concerned right now, science equipped us with the tools to debunk the political dogma against us, after all!), whether you like it or not and that the criticisms you shared are understandable, but problematic and a product of a misunderstanding of science.

I will not continue to post here or dispute scientific questions like this on FC, usually I get paid to do that shit and I'm not about to do more unpaid work in my downtime

I apologise for a lack of editing and conciseness (I know I paraphrase myself, probably unnecessarily throughout) in this post, but I just don't have time to do that when I have impending deadlines on my actual paid scientific research project/s.

I hope you can understand where I'm coming from man. Please, all I'm asking is that if you guys wanna criticize the findings of scientists (who stand distinctly apart from other experts in that we are made to more fully account for our claims than anybody else!), engage with the specific claims/findings/methods of actual scientists. Not with media claims. Not with the broad, general paraphrased claims of the media and public figures as shared by bloggers. Not from government figures.

I understand that most of us can't reasonably access a lot of the relevant science to read the direct claims of scientists - that is a genuine problem. That is not our fault as scientists, that is the problem with the industry of science that profits from and dictates the form and distribution of our research output. This industry is a fundamental source of our paychecks and is generally required to maintain ongoing college professor type roles and otherwise make money as a researcher (this system is governed by institutional administrators, academic publishers and others).

 

[grokit]

It's still unusually cold today in my neck of the woods, yet this is also happening...

Sea ice extent in Arctic and Antarctic reached record lows in November
‘Almost unprecedented’ event attributed to warm temperatures and winds, with some areas more than 20C (36F) warmer than usual

and
Over 30 Native Alaskan villages are either in the process of or in need of relocating entirely

No worries!

 

[OldOyler]

Peace all!

I try for ying...

...and yang.

Peace!

 

[GreenDragon]

herbivore21 - Thank you. Your description of Scientific Rigor is excellent.


The problem is no amount of Scientific Rigor will convince someone who denies facts.

Why is it that people who deny fact are more likely to believe fiction?

 

[grokit]

It's easy to point fingers, and say things like,

"collective insanity is the reason for the situation"

...but it's really about greed

The debate about context is somewhat interesting

But we might as well debate the nature of reality itself

 

[CarolKing]

Scott Pruitt has been picked to head the EPA. It must have been just for show when he met with Al Gore.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and a close ally of the fossil fuel industry, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, signaling Mr. Trump’s determination to dismantle President Obama’s efforts to counter climate change — and much of the E.P.A. itself.

Mr. Pruitt, a Republican, has been a key architect of the legal battle against Mr. Obama’s climate change policies, actions that fit with the president-elect’s comments during the campaign. Mr. Trump has criticized the established science of human-caused global warming as a hoax, vowed to “cancel” the Paris accord committing nearly every nation to taking action to fight climate change, and attacked Mr. Obama’s signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, as a “war on coal.”

Mr. Pruitt has been in lock step with those views.

“Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind,” he wrote in National Review earlier this year. “That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.”

 

[grokit]

 

[grokit]

Hmm...

A very unlikely white Christmas! Villagers stunned as snow falls in the Sahara for the first time in 37 YEARS

• The pictures were taken in Algeria after heavy snowfall yesterday afternoon
• Snow was last recorded in the town of Ain Sefra in February 1979 - when snowfall lasted just an hour
• Stunning images were taken by amateur photographer Karim Bouchetata
• He said villagers were 'stunned' by the unusual weather, and said the snow lasted nearly a day

This might not be the first place you'd expect to find a festive snowy scene, but incredible images show the Sahara desert looking particularly chilly. It is just the second time in living memory that snow has fallen, with the last occasion being in February 1979. The pictures were taken by amateur photographer Karim Bouchetata in the small Saharan desert town of Ain Sefra, Algeria, yesterday afternoon.

Stunning: The pictures were taken in Ain Sefra, in Algeria, yesterday afternoon

Photographer Karim Bouchetata said villagers were stunned by the snowy scene in the Sahara desert

Karim captured the amazing moment snow fell on the red sand dunes in the world's largest hot desert

He captured the amazing moment snow fell on the red sand dunes in the world's largest hot desert. Snow was last seen in Ain Sefra, which is known as 'The Gateway to the Desert', on February 18, 1979 - when the snow storm lasted just half an hour. This time the snow stayed for a day in the town, which is around 1,000 metres above sea level and surrounded by the Atlas Mountains.

Snow was last seen in Ain Sefra, which is known as 'The Gateway to the Desert', on February 18, 1979 - when the snow storm lasted just half an hour

This time the snow stayed for a day in the town, which is around 1,000 metres above sea level and surrounded by the Atlas Mountains

The photographer said: 'Everyone was stunned to see snow falling in the dessert, it is such a rare occurrence'

Karim said: 'Everyone was stunned to see snow falling in the dessert, it is such a rare occurrence. 'It looked amazing as the snow settled on the sand and made a great set of photos. 'The snow stayed for about a day and has now melted away.' The Sahara Desert covers most of Northern Africa and it has gone through shifts in temperature and moisture over the past few hundred thousand years.

Although the Sahara is very dry today, it is expected to become green again in about 15,000 years.

It is just the second time in living memory that snow has fallen in the Sahara village

It made for particularly unusual festive snowy scenes yesterday afternoon in Algeria

 

[Havelock Vetenari]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2017/01/18/noaa_announces_2016_hottest_year_on_record.html
Not good folks, not good...

 

[grokit]

Did you ever see the day after tomorrow? Paleoclimatology models are predicting that increased warming will lead to a massive change in the north atlantic jet stream, resulting in a new mini-ice age.

And it's not too far off:

"The model has shown to have a 97% accuracy when mapping the past movements of sunspots, using data of solar cycles from 1976 to 2008. And if this reliability continues, then the model also has some alarming predictions for the future: a mini ice age sometime around the 2030s."

http://www.iflscience.com/environment/we-could-be-heading-mini-ice-age-2030/

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Paleoclimatology_Evidence/paleoclimatology_evidence_2.php

https://www.iceagenow.info/snowiest-month-record-already-gunnison-co/

 

[Havelock Vetenari]

Nope, i did see some reviews though.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Day_After_Tomorrow
The IFLS page sadly hasn't been reliable for good content for quite some time now btw.
http://skepchick.org/2015/08/i-fucking-love-science-ex-admins-speak-out/
The NASA link at least is more grounded :
"Though scientists aren’t sure why carbon dioxide levels changed, almost all believe that the shift contributed to altering the climate. Because ice cores also revealed that carbon dioxide levels are much higher today than at any time recorded in the past 750,000 years, pinning down the cause-and-effect relationship between carbon dioxide and climate change continues to be a focal point of modern climate research."

Whatever happens, what seems undeniable is that we as a species are having a significant impact on the climate as never seen before and it most likely not going to be a good one.

 

[howie105]

Part of the problem with the warming discussion and many others is that once something has been politicized objectivity and cooperation are often the first victims on the way to gridlock.

 

[grokit]

It's interesting that the arctic is freezing solid atm while the antarctic is thawing out.

Global temperature extremes; warming leads to freezing! The earth is self-correcting that way.

My guess is a mini-ice-age is the best we can hope for, as the imbalance is suggestive that something more extreme could be coming our way, like a polar shift. Imo nobody really knows anything for sure.

It's just climate modeling, nothing to really be alarmed about...

 

[BeardedCrow]

I do not understand greed.
What good is being in the top 1 percent if you are killing the planet.?

Most of the extremely wealthy are very old people and do not care about earth whatsoever.

I do believe that earth climate is changing, mostly naturally like mentioned, we're technically still in the ice age, and about to transition into earth's average temperature, which is HOT!
I'm sure pollution accelerates it.

Same with animals, extinction even started before humans arrived and humans are just accelerating it.

 

[grokit]

Except for the fact that this rock we're on keeps getting further away from our cooling sun!

 

[t-dub]

I would like to point out to you people a phenomenon called precession. Its very simple and if you do not understand it you don't know what you are talking about when speaking about climate change which is a long term process. The Earth not only has an angle as it revolves around the Sun but it also "wobbles" like a top in a 32,000 year cycle which totally affects our climate.

I have said before and I will say it again. The laws of thermodynamics do not support this theory of man made climate change. If you think that .012% of the atmosphere is driving the temperature of the rest of the atmosphere, PLUS, 350 million cubic miles of ocean, at an average of 42*F, AND, 650 Billion cubic miles of Earth at an average of 2,200*F, then you are kidding yourselves. The laws of thermodynamics which Einstein said were the most unshakable in the universe disagrees with you. Why do you think all of this "science" has been "settled". Its a political dogma mixing with science that does not reflect reality. Good science is never "settled" it is tested over and over again to repeat its results. But not climate change. .. oh no . .. me MUST believe in it or be called a "denier". That's a smear and a lot of bullshit.

EVERY single computer model that the "scientists" have come out with has not come close to predicting reality. NOT ONE! Why is that? Its because they are adjusting the data to make the past look cooler and the present to look warmer. Just look at the differences between the raw and adjusted data? Its so obviously agenda driven. And this imaginary, CO2 feedback loop they describe does not exist in reality.

If what they are saying is correct, then when a cloud comes between you and the Sun, you should feel warmer, not cooler. Let me explain. When sunlight comes into the atmosphere it hits a CO2 molecule, which then vibrates, reducing energy, and a lower energy particle is emitted. Well guess what, water molecules and CO2 molecules react in the same way. This means that if a cloud comes between you and the sun, it should make you feel cooler, not hotter, according to the "scientists" but we all know that isn't true, and not what they are claiming as fact.

Also if CO2 is a poison how can a mother's breath on her baby's face when she is inhaling 400 parts per million of CO2 and exhaling 40,000 parts be considered no problem. If you want to say a baby's mother's breath is poison then you go for it. This is just reality and also CO2 is plant food.

I have put many hours into my study and I am reading some things now that will bring more "light" to the conversation.

Beware repeaters of information you do not understand.

 

[grokit]

Yeah fuck those scientists, with all of their degrees and data and measurements and consensus and shit. We're not causing climate change, but it's becoming harder to convince that we're not accelerating it.

Ice age, then back to the tropics? Will our new poles be on our current equator?

Speculation is entertaining, and ratings are up

 

[t-dub]

I thought you would be the first to reply, with no facts, of course.

What about this:

Georgia Tech Climatologist Judith Curry Resigns over 'the CRAZINESS in the field of climate science.'

This just happened but I don't see any of you climate people talking about it. This woman gave up her career because of what she saw in the "climate science" community. TOTAL BULLSHIT.

Climatologist and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology Judith Curry has announced her resignation effective immediately on her blog, Climate, Etc. Others have said: "I have long found Curry to be an honest researcher and a fair-minded disputant in the ongoing debates over man-made climate change. She excelled at pointing out the uncertainties and deficiencies of climate modeling. Given the thoroughly politicized nature of climate science her efforts to clarify what is known and unknown by climate science caused her to be pilloried as "anti-science" by other researchers who are convinced that man-made global warming is leading toward catastrophe.

In her blog announcement Curry explains her resignation:

Effective January 1, I have resigned my tenured faculty position at Georgia Tech.

Why did I resign my tenured faculty position?

The deeper reasons have to do with my growing disenchantment with universities, the academic field of climate science and scientists."

Wrong trousers

I’ve been in school since I was 5 years old. Until a few years ago, I regarded a tenured faculty position at a major university to be a dream job, and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Apart from my own personal career trajectory and the ‘shocks’ that started in 2005 with our hurricanes and global warming paper, and the massive spike in 2009/2010 from Climategate, I’ve found that universities have changed substantially over the past 5-10 years.

At first, I thought the changes I saw at Georgia Tech were due to a change in the higher administration (President, Provost, etc). The academic nirvana under the prior Georgia Tech administration of Wayne Clough, Jean-Lou Chameau and Gary Schuster was a hard act to follow. But then I started to realize that academia and universities nationwide were undergoing substantial changes. I came across a recent article that expresses part of what is wrong: Universities are becoming like mechanical nightingales.

The reward system that is in place for university faculty members is becoming increasingly counterproductive to actually educating students to be able to think and cope in the real world, and in expanding the frontiers of knowledge in a meaningful way (at least in certain fields that are publicly relevant such as climate change). I’ve written on these topics before, I won’t belabor this here.

So why not try to change the system from the inside? Well, this is not the battle I want to fight, apart from any realistic assessment of being able to shift the ponderous beast from within.

Or maybe it’s just a case of ‘wrong trousers’ as far as I’m concerned. Simply, universities no longer feel like the ‘real deal’ to me (note: this criticism is not targeted at Georgia Tech, which is better than most). It’s time for me to leave the ivory tower.

A deciding factor was that I no longer know what to say to students and postdocs regarding how to navigate the CRAZINESS in the field of climate science. Research and other professional activities are professionally rewarded only if they are channeled in certain directions approved by a politicized academic establishment — funding, ease of getting your papers published, getting hired in prestigious positions, appointments to prestigious committees and boards, professional recognition, etc.

How young scientists are to navigate all this is beyond me, and it often becomes a battle of scientific integrity versus career suicide (I have worked through these issues with a number of skeptical young scientists).

Let me relate an interaction that I had with a postdoc about a month ago. She wanted to meet me, as an avid reader of my blog. She works in a field that is certainly relevant to climate science, but she doesn’t identify as a climate scientist. She says she gets questioned all the time about global warming issues, and doesn’t know what to say, since topics like attribution, etc. are not topics that she explores as a scientist. WOW, a scientist that knows the difference! I advised her to keep her head down and keep doing the research that she thinks interesting and important, and to stay out of the climate debate UNLESS she decides to dig in and pursue it intellectually. Personal opinions about the science and political opinions about policies that are sort of related to your research expertise are just that – personal and political opinions. Selling such opinions as contributing to a scientific consensus is very much worse than a joke.

Stepping back from all this, I reminded myself that I was a tenured faculty member – in principle I could do whatever I wanted. The intellectual pursuits that now interest me are:

• Assessment of climate science in a manner that is relevant for policy, with full account of uncertainty
• Explore philosophy of science issues as related to epistemology of climate models, reasoning about uncertain complex issues
• Decision making under deep uncertainty
• Sociology of science and experimenting with social media

When I first started down this new path in 2010, I published papers that could be categorized as applied philosophy of science (e.g. uncertainty monster, etc). This seemed to be a path towards maintaining academic ‘legitimacy’ in light of my new interests, but frankly I got bored with playing the game. Why go to the extra effort to publish papers, wrestling with reviewers who (usually) know less than you do about your topic (not to mention their biases), having to pay to get an article published some months in the future, so that maybe 100 people will read it? Not to mention the broader issues related to coping with the university bureaucracy, government funding, etc.

Once you detach from the academic mindset, publishing on the internet makes much more sense, and the peer review you can get on a technical blog is much more extensive. But peer review is not really the point; provoking people to think in new ways about something is really the point. In other words, science as process, rather than a collection of decreed ‘truths.’

At this point, I figure that I can reach more people (including students and young researchers) via social media. Do I pretend to have any answers to all this? No, but I hope I am provoking students and scientists to think outside of their little bubble.

The real world

So my fall from the ivory tower that started in 2005 is now complete [link to my 2006 AGU presentation agu_integrityofscience_curry] .

What next?

I am interested in figuring out new and better ways to apply weather and climate data, weather forecast information and future regional climate scenarios to supporting real world decision making to manage risks and associated with weather and climate variability.

I became interested in such applications over a decade ago, and Peter Webster and I founded a company Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN) to do just that. If you haven’t checked out our website (ever or even recently), check it out – cfanclimate.net – I spent my entire winter break revising the website using some good suggestions from Larry Kummer of Fabius Maximus fame.

CFAN started as a university start-up company in 2006, and didn’t have any full time employees until a few years go. We now employ 7 Ph.D. scientists (in addition to myself and Peter), plus software engineers, etc. With my retirement from Georgia Tech, we are spinning up the company into a new phase to explore new forecast product developments and decision support tools, new markets, new partnerships, new regions.

So far, most of CFAN’s revenue comes from the ‘weather’ side (days to seasons), with a few projects on developing future climate scenarios (I wrote about a current project here Generating regional scenarios of climate change).

I find all this tremendously interesting, challenging and rewarding. Not to mention enormously time consuming (CFAN needs to make more money so that we can hire more people to take some of the load off myself and the other managers, all of whom are wearing too many hats). I am learning a huge amount about decision support, management, marketing and sales, finance, etc.

At this point, the private sector seems like a more ‘honest’ place for a scientist working in a politicized field than universities or government labs — at least when you are your own boss. anyone else to pay for it).

 

[grokit]

I thought you would be the first to reply, with no facts, of course.

Of course !

You take this more seriously than I do. When I learn about so many competing versions of a given reality, especially one that I have no control over, that reality becomes subjectively entertaining to me.

To me it's a race between inundated coastal cities, and glaciers in the midwest; maybe both!

 

[t-dub]

You take this more seriously than I do.

Well with the ramifications of this out and out fraud, that is going to affect your taxes and how you live, you might want to take a closer look.

 

[grokit]

Well with the ramifications of this out and out fraud, that is going to affect your taxes and how you live, you might want to take a closer look.

But there's always competing arguments.
I hope you're right and the alarmists are wrong.

Besides wtf can I do about it, vote?

 

[t-dub]

But there's always competing arguments.
I hope you're right and the alarmists are wrong.

Dude, did you actually read that crap you just posted? It had NO SUBSTANCE what-so-ever. JUST LOOK AT IT. NOTHING of any substance was reported there against her arguments. You REALLY need to actually read this crap before you post it and the sources it came from. This was not a scientific publication or a peer reviewed debunking of what she said. Its pure bullshit coming from an opposition force that has a vested interest in promoting this fraud on the American people.

Her dialogue is so much more informative, and so much more real than what you just posted, that I can't believe you would even posit it as a counter argument. You are delusional.